


Reflections from Kuwait – introspective

by Charles_Rockafellor



Category: Original Work
Genre: Coping, Deployment, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Military Families, Sometimes life gets in the way
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-26
Updated: 2020-05-26
Packaged: 2021-03-02 23:47:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 822
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24385309
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Charles_Rockafellor/pseuds/Charles_Rockafellor
Summary: Taking a break from all your worries sure would help a lot.  Wouldn't you like to get away?  Sometimes we want to go.𝑫𝒐𝒏'𝒕 𝒇𝒐𝒓𝒈𝒆𝒕 𝒕𝒐 𝑳𝒊𝒌𝒆, 𝑺𝒉𝒂𝒓𝒆, 𝒂𝒏𝒅 𝑺𝒖𝒃𝒔𝒄𝒓𝒊𝒃𝒆! ❤️
Comments: 2
Kudos: 1
Collections: War is Hell, Worldbuilding Meta





	Reflections from Kuwait – introspective

Quiet. Peaceful. Most people would probably look at being deployed as either something to avoid for fear of death, or as some kind of excuse to goof off away from their regular duties. For me it was an escape.

Can you picture that?

I went to what was qualified as a combat zone, though it seemed OK to me from what I could see. The TAVV (or whatever it was supposed to be called) that I worked out of had a big-ass crater dug into the back of its roof from some previous missile strike. The tanks had just pulled out of Iraq right before my bucket arrived at Ali al Salem, not far from the border. Someone said that just down the road the walls were riddled with bullet scars and the old base commander had been hanged from the flagpole when Iraq came in (true or not, I don't know, and I never checked the wall down the road).

All that I saw was nobody screaming at me, a dark and quiet bed, plenty of food that one could eat in peace, a nice coffee shop where I could go and sit on my laptop in a social atmosphere...

For those of you who've never been military, it's not like some movie – “ _Iron Eagle_ ” or something. You don't simply decide that you're going to some war-torn place to take out some bad guy. No. Full stop. You get orders to someplace, and you go on a certain date, and you do the job that you were already doing at your home base – turn wrenches, fill out paperwork, etc.. After a given period of time, you pack your A-bag again, get onto another boring plane, and go home.

At least, that's the plan. If things had been going rather poorly at home for a number of years by that point, and your having left simply gave license for someone to up the ante, and you end up having an emotional breakdown, then the return trip might be a bit sooner than otherwise.

MedEvac is weird. I touched down somewhere in Afghanistan for an overnight (no idea why) before hitting Landstuhl for a few days en route to San Antonio for a week or something. They checked my O2 every hour or two on at least one of those flights, for some reason – I asked the number only once, which had been 84 that time, because of the medic's body language; the others simply did their thing and I was wherever we were (afterthought: I had pneumonia three or four months later, failed my PT, was given a month to retest, managed to pass). I don't really remember it much, other than being vaguely aware of the fact that I wasn't thinking anymore, just drifting along pleasantly.

Another funny thing is that it seems that everyone and their mother gets a medal for simply going wherever and doing their normal, everyday job. Everyone and their mother, that is, unless you do the same thing as everyone else until being MedEvacced. No medal for you. That's not important, but it's funny.

It smelled nice there. You would think that it'd be sort of sand-like in its scent, but the air held a more clay-like essence. Really pleasant, albeit a little surreal. Walking, that was a little less pleasant, at least by day. The sand is pretty much like sand at any beach: it eats your feet and takes maybe two or three times the effort needed for a given result. Night is a little easier, I guess. It seemed so, anyway. The sand felt a bit more stiff, though that could have been my imagination.

The coffee at the flight line chow-hall wasn't like that of the main chow-hall or of the coffee shop, both of which were pretty decent. Nope, this stuff was amazing. “ _...amazingly bad flavor, made weak to dilute that, and burned to make up for the weakness. It was also amazing to realize just how much amazement the mind could contain at once, much less from a single experience_ ,” to quote “ _Seize the Deity_ ” (yes, it was so utterly amazing that it has now made it into both my main fanfic and this introspective). Still, it was coffee, and went well enough as something wet to wash down lunch. I vaguely remember a lot of pixie-stick things with some kind of powdered cappuccino mix in them; those and bacon. With the main chow hall I generally went for bacon, eggs, high calorie dinner foods, juice, coffee, and milk for dine-in, plus a few heroes to go. It was peaceful.

I keep coming back to that because “peaceful” isn't necessarily a word that one might associate with being deployed. Then again, this base was also nicknamed “Club Med.”

Club Med or no, it was an escape for me, and I greatly appreciated that.

Part of me never left.

**O ~~~ O**


End file.
